


everybody's got their limits (nobody's found mine)

by illuminatedcities



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 05:37:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6691750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how Root meets god: she picks up a phone and there she is, that voice that will haunt all her dreams like a song. When the Machine talks to her, it's not like human speech, it's the flicker of morse code and a kaleidoscope of voices in her head. It's overwhelming, powerful. It's like crawling out of a dark place and seeing the sun for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everybody's got their limits (nobody's found mine)

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much to sky for beta & encouragement. <3
> 
> title from "choked out" by the mountain goats.

Maybe you did not know this about her, but she looked different, before. Softer, more like a girl and less like a weapon. She was a blonde, can you believe it? If you know her now, you probably can't. When she got out of that godforsaken town in Texas she dyed her hair in the artificial yellow light of a dirty gas station restroom. She had it dark ever since. Maybe you think that's a metaphor: to be honest, she doesn't really care what you think either way.

Technically, Trent Russell was the first man she ever killed, but who is even keeping score. Sometimes she thinks that her life could have been different – less _fucked up_ , maybe – if Hanna hadn't died or if her mom hadn't died or if adults weren't fucking cowards and traitors but, really? At the end of the day? Maybe it always had to turn out this way.

Root knows that she could have never been a real life Caroline Turing, but it's nice, to dig around in other people's dirty mental laundry. Take John Rooney (definitely not his real name), who sits in front of her pretending to be a person who does not know how it feels to snap someone's neck in cold blood. He looks _tortured_ about it, too, like a puppy who peed on the carpet and wants to be cuddled and forgiven. A killer with a fucking conscience, what a joke.

She sees Harold's code before she ever sees his face but that is right, that's just how it's supposed to be. He flinches when she pulls the trigger, which is a disappointment. Then again, people have always been scared of her. They _should be_ , with the electrical storm fizzling between her synapses, the lightning strike of her intellect. Fear is a reasonable evolutionary instinct. You should be afraid of dangerous things. (Are you afraid of her yet? Don't worry. You will be.)

_It's okay, Harold,_ she wants to say. _I'll do all the dirty work. I'll get the blood on my hands so yours will stay clean._

Root makes him bleed, eventually, with one sharp flick of her wrist. It's not a sophisticated plan, not _impressive_ , but his pulse speeds up under her fingers like she has caught a little sparrow in her palms, flapping its wings in a panic. _I'll ruin you_ , she thinks, and something in her sparks and catches fire.

“If you were as reasonable as you claim you are,” Harold says, straining against the zip ties around his arms, the knot of his tie askew, “You would cut me loose and trust that your arguments speak for themselves.”

She leans in and straightens his tie. He is so concerned with his civilized human façade, she wants him to look good. “I never said that I was _reasonable_ , Harry. Revolutionaries have always been misunderstood. Prophets have been crucified for speaking the truth.”

“You're not a prophet,” he says, cold and hard like an edge she could cut herself on. Oh, she loves him, with as much feeling as she can squeeze out of her scarred little heart, this flawed man with his toothwheel brain.

Root puts a needle against his neck, and his eyes widen. “One day you'll understand, Harry. One day you'll see what we could accomplish together. What we could be to each other.”

“Just put me under,” he says.

“No need to be hurtful,” she says, and feels his body lose all tension beneath her hands when she injects the sedative. She catches him, keeps his head from tipping to the side. Root wonders if she can feel the cool metal bolts drilled into his bones, but there is just the warmth of skin against her fingertips. _If you create a god, what does that make you?_

Of course, she doesn't get to go through with her plans, not when Harold's puppy has taken up his scent and trails after him. A shame, really: why keep an animal that can't decide between being an attack dog and a pet that curls up in your lap. Someone should take him behind a shed and drown him in a bucket.

This is how Root meets god: she picks up a phone and there she is, that voice that will haunt all her dreams like a song. When the Machine talks to her, it's not like human speech, it's the flicker of morse code and a kaleidoscope of voices in her head. It's overwhelming, powerful. It's like crawling out of a dark place and seeing the sun for the first time.

This is how Root meets Sameen: Root blinks and nearly misses the challenge on her face, cocky and daring even when tied to a chair. _Come and make me,_ she seems to say, dirty smirk and no fear in her eyes at all.

_You should be afraid of me,_ Root thinks. _That is how the game is played_.

Sameen, she later learns, has no patience for games. She'd rather smash the pieces.

Of course you already know this part of the story, the bitter part, the one where things break. (It's okay if you don't like her, right now. It's okay if you never grow to like her. She doesn't tell this story for you, you know.)

Her connection is taken from her – an empty warehouse, the _pity_ on Harold's face –, and Root recoils back into that place she last went when Hanna was lost, somewhere quiet. A place where the thoughts can't reach her.

Stoneridge Hospital is not so bad, if you like being locked up in a mental institution. Oh, how she must have _scared_ Harold. She wonders if he ever thought to lock up his little pet, after all the things _he_ has done: so many molars pulled out of dead bodies, the smell of bleach and gunpowder, so many pulled triggers in _his_ past; the poor broken hero. (How boring, his self-hatred, how weak. She made herself into a weapon and _smiled_.) Maybe it's different if you love someone, Root thinks philosophically. Maybe their sins don't feel quite as heavy then.

Maybe you think that it broke her, just a little bit, but the truth is that Root stashes all the colorful pills under her mattress and smiles at the doctors and tells such elaborate lies that she can see their little minds hurrying to catch up. She collects diagnoses like colorful ribbons that she can stick to her wall: _antisocial personality disorder, schizoid personality type, narcissistic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic episode, schizophrenia._

The Machine hums low and deep in her subconscious and Root wanders the hallways, all these little lonely people with their minds that will never touch greatness. Dr. Carmichael looks at her like he would love to put her under a microscope, pin her to a cork board like a butterfly.

“Are you aware that the voice you claim to hear is not actually real?” There is something casual about his sadism. Root wonders if he writes it down in his little notebook if he makes a patient cry.

Root smiles. She bites her tongue a lot: if she didn't, on some days, they'd lock her up in a padded room and throw away the key. You see, it's fine if they think that you're insane. That means you're pathetic, and weak, a girl trapped inside of her own mind. If they considered, for just one second, who she really is, what power boils in her blood, she'd stop being a girl and start being a monster. Root bites her tongue. She'll never get rid of the taste of blood in her mouth.

“Did I say something amusing?” Dr. Carmichael asks.

“No, _she_ said something funny just now,” Root says. She looks at the letter opener on the desk and imagines jabbing it into his jugular. It seems reckless, to have a letter opener lying around in a mental institution. There are some seriously disturbed people here. “You wouldn't talk like that if you could hear her.”

“If I could hear her, Miss Farrow, I would belong on the other side of this desk,” he says in the friendly tone of interrogators and executioners.

She turns her head towards the window and closes her eyes. “You're right, of course,” she says. She doesn't talk to him, but he doesn't know that.

Root is not a stranger to prisons: her dear Harry puts her into another one, his hands steady on the lock. “It's for your own good,” he says. (They always say that. Harold believes it, she knows. She doesn't know if that makes it better or not.)

This one is prettier, though, with large wooden shelves and stacked to the ceiling with books. There's a shock bracelet around her ankle, a delightful cruelty: at least now she knows that he has the stomach for it, even if he shies away from guns. There are many ways to inflict damage, after all. She should know: she wrote the book on how to break people in ten steps or less.

Root wonders if he sits upstairs and sips his tea all day, breaks computer systems wide open with a few keystrokes. She wonders if he bends his pretty boy over his desk and fucks him, or if he won't let himself indulge that much. Harold looks at her like she is the Manhattan Project, a mushroom cloud waiting to happen.

“Miss Groves,” he says, and it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to her. There are certain kinds of torture where you just inflict a little hurt, like a needle to your fingertip, or a drop of water on your forehead. You do it over and over and over again. It drives people insane.

She tightens her hand in the wire fence. “You know you want what I can show you, Harry. You're just scared.”

There is distaste on his face. “Tell me if you need anything, Miss Groves.” _Drop drop drop._

A woman shatters the little bones in her inner ear once and Root finds a way to put a knife to her throat. The secret is to take it in increments: her mother used to say _You can stand almost anything for ten seconds._ So this is how you do it: the pain comes and you take it, just ten seconds at once, you can do that, you can stand _anything_ for that amount of time, and then you add ten more, and ten more, and suddenly you can turn the tables and flip the knife around and press it against someone's windpipe. Easy as pie.

Her mother also told Root that she should follow her talents, and oh, she is good at this, the click of the safety and the sound when the gun goes off; she'll hit a target without bothering to aim.

Another woman looks at her through muzzle flashes and burning gunpowder and puts her hands on Root's wounds and shows her teeth like a wolf. (Root might talk to a god, but _this_ is all the religion she needs, Sameen's finger on a trigger or gripping her waist on the back of a fast motorcycle.)

Maybe you did not know this about her, but she has always stood on the ledge of a building and looked up at the sky. There is always another gun to fire, another fence to throw her weight against.

The cochlear implant makes Root feel less human and that is a mercy, too. At night, the Machine hums and clicks inside of her brain, and it feels like there is someone with her, a dear friend singing her to sleep. Oh, you think, but this is how you fall in love, this is how you start to _need_ something. The secret is that you can stand almost anything for ten seconds, pain and fear and love and loss.

Root tries to train herself to _feel_ more because it makes Harold happy when she does. Oh, you see the irony in this, don't you? You can already tell where this leads.

Root made a living out of convincing herself that she has a firecracker mind and a cold, cold heart. She did not ask to _need_ people. She did not ask the world to rip her heart of out her chest and break it, but this is what happens, isn't it. This is what always happens. Either you curl up all your broken edges inside of yourself and lock a library door behind you or you turn them inside out: the world may be cruel but she made herself into a thing with sharp claws and razor blade teeth: the world may be cruel but she is _worse_.

Of course, the trick to not getting hurt is to draw blood first, but how can you do that when your heart is all soft with affection beneath: for the way Sameen rips off a piece of duct tape with her teeth, the slick shine of blood in her hair, the livid bruises on her rib cage like ink under her skin.

Root won't kneel next to Harold and beg forgiveness, like a dog, like _John._ She knows what she's done and she knows where she'll end up. The thing about bloodstains is that once the white cloth is soaked in red, you can never get it out, and it doesn't matter if you add more, it just doesn't. She can give them this at least, she is already tainted. (Harold looks at her as if she is the nuclear winter, and she has never felt such warmth in her chest.)

_Look how dangerous I am_ , Root says, and fires the gun and sets the ground on fire, but Harold just nods as if to say: _Don't burn yourself, my dear_. They are done with cages, and there really is no point in locking up your own soldiers in the middle of a war. Maybe that is all the benediction she can ask for: for Harold to touch her without a wire fence between them.

_Hold me down_ , Root says, and Sameen does, all wild snarl and her hands like hot ropes around Root's wrists. Sameen kisses Root's bruises after, where the blood is pooling in purple and blue like a small galaxy contained in her body, and Root can't look at her. She closes her eyes and counts to ten. (You can stand _anything_ for ten seconds, even tenderness, even _that._ )

_Can you hear me?,_ the Machine asks, and Root has tears in her eyes when she says: Yes, _yes,_ when she taps it out in morse code with her fingertips.

(So maybe you think that she is an explosion, a gasoline fire, well guess what; she is, she _is._ )


End file.
